"Rankings continue to matter more and more for SEO." What is the importance of Rankings in 2015 as far as you're concerned?

Rankings are important. The higher you rank the more traffic you?ll receive. With Google continually adjusting the results page and adding other elements, being placed higher will only help you generate more traffic.

What are your favorite strategies to get your site or content ranked in the Google SERPs?

Write extremely good content. It seems that good content always wins with Google?s endless changing algorithm. For this reason I continually spend thousands of dollars on Quick Sprout each month. I see the value in high quality content and clean designs as content that looks beautiful tends to have a higher perceived value.

What would you say are the 3 critical elements to be covered in an SEO site audit?

Lot of people tend to ignore site speed. Having a faster loading site helps with rankings.

Internal linking and how pages are cross promoted with each other tend to be forgotten when this helps with rankings.Lastly links still have a huge impact on rankings. People have stopped focusing on link building when they shouldn?t. Sure you shouldn?t buy links, but manually link building is still effective.

What features do you think are missing in mainstream SEO tools? Are there any processes you'd love to see automated?

Notifications. I wish a tool would just email you what specific changes you need to make in clear English that would help boost your rankings. People are tired at looking at reports. They want to know specific changes.